Are you ready for a big emergency? Do you have the required 6 to 12 months’ emergency fund?

I can hear your groan now. Who has enough extra money to put aside 6 to 12 months in the bank? If you have expenses of $3,000 a month, an ample emergency fund of 6 to 12 months would be $18,000 to $36,000. Definitely not small change.

An emergency fund is hard to build, and that may be part of the reason why many people never even try.

But there will be an emergency that will occur sometime in your life. You will need that money.

Financial Death by a Thousand Nicks

We relocated to Arizona 10 months ago. Doing so drained our meager emergency fund. For a few months, we were doing pretty good and getting back on our feet until we started facing endless financial nicks—braces for our son, $2,000 in medical and dental expenses, $1,500 in car repairs, etc. The last five months have been financially very difficult.

If we would have had a 6 to 12 month emergency fund, our job now would be to rebuild the emergency fund, not do constant damage control. I think it will be a few more months until we are financially in the clear, assuming no other major expenses come up. Meanwhile, we feel extremely vulnerable financially.

The Big Emergency Worst Case Scenario

However, our current financial difficulties are nothing compared to what others face. My daughters’ therapist is living a financial nightmare. Her husband had a stroke and now has locked in syndrome, which means he has his full mental faculties, but he can’t move his body. He is no older than 40. No one would expect this to happen.

The therapist’s life now is driving to see her husband and advocate for him as well as juggling the finances of losing one income as well as the rapidly mounting medical expenses. She does work but has had to take frequent days off. Even with a Go Fund Me page that brought her nearly $50,000 in donations, I have no idea how she is handling the expenses.

Of course, this is a worst case scenario, but still, an emergency fund to liquidate in this situation would be nice.

Take Baby Steps to Reach Your Goal

Right now, my husband and I are struggling to stay out of debt. So far we’ve succeeded, but we’re right on the edge. Still, our plan is to put a small amount away in our emergency fund, say $50 a month. Something is always better than nothing.

In the next few months, we’ll amp that amount up to a couple of hundred a month and keep increasing as we are able. We won’t have a sizeable emergency fund anytime soon, but we will have some money put aside.

Too often, it’s easy to look at your finances when everything is going right and say to yourself, “We’re doing alright. I can afford to splurge.”

But that’s short-sighted thinking. Look at your finances and ask yourself how would you be financially if you had several smaller emergencies of a few hundred or thousand dollars or if the worst case scenario happened?

My advice is to wait to splurge until you have that emergency fund. Trust me, one day you’ll be glad.

Do you have a 6 to 12 month emergency fund, or do you find it too difficult to achieve?

Early yesterday morning, I awoke to my wife jumping out of bed. “Do you smell smoke?” She asked. Let me tell you, there are few things that will pull you out of that just woke up groggy state than a question like that. And, sure enough, I did. A quick check told me that there was no visible fire or smoke in the upstairs portion of our house. It wasn’t clear what the source of the smell was. I quickly ran downstairs to check the rest of the house, fully expecting to find a smoldering spot somewhere. Nothing. Down to the basement. Nothing. Back upstairs. Still nothing, but the smell is still there. I went from room to room, floor to floor, sniffing the air trying to pinpoint where the smell was strongest. The good news was that it wasn’t getting any stronger, but I still didn’t have source for it. The only thing that I can find is that the furnace doesn’t seem to be working.

By this point, my wife has gotten the kids up, and is working on getting them dressed just in case we have to make a hasty exit from the house. There isn’t any immediate danger, I don’t think, but you just never know. It just so happens that a close friend is a member of the rural fire department here. We’re in the city fire department district, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, so we called him for some quick advice. I quickly fill him in, and he suggests that I call the city fire department and have them come check the house for carbon monoxide and also do a hotspot check with their thermal imager. I certainly didn’t have to be told twice, so that’s exactly what I did.

A couple firefighters show up, give the house a quick once over and come to the same conclusion that I have. The furnace has gone out. And, for some reason, has filled the house with the smell that we awoke to. They can find no hot spots, and the CO tester is not indicating any CO threat. We cut the power to the furnace, and everyone agrees that there is no immediate threat. We can go about our business. Well, with the exception of calling the furnace repair folks in to figure out what’s wrong with the furnace. Some of you might not think it’s a big deal, but we still haven’t seen 30 degrees in March. The nightly lows are in the single digits. In just the short time that the furnace has been out, the temperature in the house has dropped 10 degrees.

I called the furnace repair company, and, to my surprise, they sent one out right away. Luckily, I caught the guy as he was headed out the door for a call, so he could easily be rerouted to our house. A couple hours later, and we had a working furnace again. Turns out, the blower motor that pushes the air through the ductwork and into the house had stopped working. It lost its bearings. Literally. The result was that it started to leak some lubricant oil and actually melted some of the electrical work in its housing which is what made the stink. The company bills for the repair, so we only have an estimate as to what the cost of the repair will be. The repairman thinks less than $200.

We’re lucky. We’re lucky, because our house didn’t catch fire. We’re lucky, because we aren’t trying to figure out how we can live out of a motel room until our fire damaged house can be repaired, or, worse, until we can find a new house to replace our destroyed house. We’re lucky, because we aren’t trying to figure out how we’ll replace any of our belongings. We’re lucky, because we’re safe.

But, to a lesser degree, we’re lucky, because we can afford the repair. It wasn’t that long ago that an unexpected bill for $200 would have had us wondering if we were going to have to choose bills to go unpaid. But, we took control of our finances. We’ve got a long way to go, but, a $200 emergency doesn’t mean that a bill goes unpaid. And, that makes us feel safe too.

Inevitably, you’re going to screw up. You’re going to make a mistake and it’s gonna cost you. If you’re lucky, it’s only going to cost you a few dollars or a bit of bruised pride. If you’re not so lucky, it could cost you much more than that.

Let me tell you a little secret. We’ve all been there. In all likelihood, we’ll all be there again. But, some of us will get back up, dust ourselves off, and get back to doing what it was we were doing in the first place. The rest will sit on the ground where they landed, beaten and broken, and never get back up. They’ve given up. The world got the best of them, and they have lost the will to try again.

Getting back up isn’t the hard part. Gathering the will to get back up is.

None of us who have fallen and gotten back up have any greater aptitude for it than anyone else. Sure, we may be better at some things than other people, but when we fail, we are all the same. Here’s a little bit more of a secret. Some of us are better prepared for the fall. We’ve done what we can to soften the blow, not because it’s inevitable, but because it could happen. Think of it this way; you don’t buy health insurance because your sick, (well most don’t) you buy it in case you get sick. You don’t wear a helmet while bicycling because you know you’re going to fall, you wear it in case you do fall. Sometimes situations are out of our control. We certainly don’t choose to get sick. And we don’t choose to fall off of our bikes on to the hard concrete below. But, sometimes it happens. And the better prepared you are for it, the easier it is to get back up and get going.

An example.

Many years ago (something like 7), I drove a old pickup (older than I am). One particularly cold day, then engine refused to start. It refused to start the next day despite having a charger on it and attempts to pull start it. I couldn’t go without a car, so what was I to do? I had no savings, and no means of coming up with any extra money. I had fallen. In order to get myself up and out of the hole I had dug, I was forced to take on a massive (for me at the time) car loan on a used car. The bank wouldn’t finance much without a down payment, so I took what I could get. It was a terribly low spot for me, financially. I went from having no car payment at all, to having a car payment of a little under $200 a month. I could afford it, but just barely. If anything had happened to my income or if an emergency of some sort had arisen, I would have fallen that much farther (and harder). To be honest, I didn’t learn all that much from that particular episode. But, I did get back up and back on the road.

A week or so ago, my car sprung an oil leak. The repair wasn’t horribly expensive (only about $150), but enough that it could have been very damaging if I had been in the same situation as I was before. But, I’m not. I’m prepared. I have a small emergency fund that can easily cover an expense of that magnitude. The fall wasn’t nearly as bad. It wasn’t as bad of a situation as it was before, either. But, because I had prepared, the fall was very short and I was able to recover quickly. In fact, it was less of a fall than it was just a little bump.

Preparing for an emergency isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that you are expecting to have an emergency any more than having health insurance means you’re expecting to get sick, or wearing a bike helmet means you’re expecting to fall. But it cushions you against the fall. Getting sick is less stressful if you have insurance that you know will pick up part of the bill. You’ll have less road rash if you’re wearing a helmet. And, if you have an emergency fund, more falls will become bumps.

Do yourself the favor. Prepare now, so that when you do fall, you’ve got some cushioning to land on.

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